For
a guy who's had enough arduous life experience to fill up two memoirs
with heavy questions about fatherhood, alcohol abuse, homelessness,
suicide, and torture, Nick Flynn seems to keep in remarkably good
spirits, if the playful banter he struck up with the crowd during a
recent book reading is any indicator. The author of 2004's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,
which is mostly about his relationship (or lack thereof) with an
alcoholic criminal of a father, Flynn weaves his internal struggles
into grander political explorations, primarily those of Bush-era war
atrocities in his new memoir, The Ticking Is the Bomb.

Not
exactly light subject matter by any standards, but Flynn continually
finds a way to maintain a sense of zen in his frank presentation of
both personal and universal horrors. The daily meditation he practiced
while writing the book probably helped out. "I felt like I was writing
from a place of obsession in some ways [with Another Bullshit Night in Suck City],"
Flynn explained to the crowd during his reading at Berklee's 939 Cafe
back in January. "And I said, 'I want to write this new one from a
meditative place' ... I ended up figuring out that if I wanted to do
that, that meant I had to meditate. So I meditated for like two years,
every day for half an hour in the middle of writing this book."

Routine
meditation didn't stifle the Scituate-born Flynn's penchant for literal
and figurative map-hopping in his storytelling, however: The Ticking Is the Bomb,
in a series of vignettes, touches on everything from infant CPR
training prior to the birth of his daughter, to a stint in Istanbul
documenting the experiences of Iraqi detainees, as Flynn takes "a hard
look at the dark and dangerous world into which his daughter would soon
be born" (in the words of former Phoenix staffer Mike Miliard, who profiled Flynn earlier this year).
"Some of the days you are given will be spent in a strange city," Flynn
read from his book, "And at the end of the day, you will know that you
have spoken to no one except the girl you got your coffee from."

Skipping
from vignette to vignette at 939, Flynn joked about his memoir-writing
ADHD in his new book. "So you're probably all getting a pretty good
sense of what the book's about at this point," he teased after reading
two seemingly unrelated passages. "On skipping around: I think you'd
have more satisfaction if you read it front to back ... but you can
just open it up to any page, I guess."